


Can't Keep A Good Man Down

by galaxysoup



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Crack, Fix-It, Humor, Post-Movie(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-29
Updated: 2012-11-29
Packaged: 2017-11-19 19:34:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,053
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/576868
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/galaxysoup/pseuds/galaxysoup
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Phil Coulson finds death to be less well-organized than he had expected.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Just a little bit of silliness to get the writing juices flowing again.

_Well,_ Phil thought, struggling to breathe through the massive puncture wound in his chest, _that didn’t go entirely to plan._

Fury’s worried face only underlined that thought. “Just stay awake. Eyes on me!” He barked.

Regrettably, it appeared that Phil would be unable to follow that particular order. Lack of oxygen was becoming an issue. Although his body had helpfully gone into shock and was keeping him from feeling most of the pain, he was 90% certain that he was due to pass out quite soon.

“No,” he gasped, truly regretful. “I’m clocking out here.” The helicarrier’s med team was top-notch and had an excellent response time (Phil had supervised some of their drills himself), but given the chaos and the probable other casualties the chances of them getting to him before he lost consciousness were slim. It wasn’t like it mattered that much, anyway. As satisfying as it had been to blast Loki through the bulkhead - and as secretly proud as he was of his James Bond-esque one-liner before he pulled the trigger - it was pretty safe to say that at this point the whole Avengers project had devolved into a pretty spectacular mess.

“Not an option,” Fury said firmly. Despite himself, Phil almost smiled at his boss’ determination.

“It’s okay, boss. This was never going to work...”

Damn. The oxygen issue was really starting to take effect. Fury’s face was starting to fade, swallowed up by hypoxia. “...if they didn’t have something... to...”

Oh, to hell with it. He’d put in a lot of overtime this week. He was probably allowed a little fainting spell. Fury would figure out what he meant, anyway.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * 

Phil was a little annoyed to find that when he opened his eyes again he was all alone. There weren’t even any reassuring hospital noises around him. It was still pretty dark, which was why it took him a moment to realise he was still on the helicarrier, staring out over the empty space where the containment unit had once been.

Despite himself, he felt a brief surge of irritation. He was in no pain and his respiration was normal, so he’d clearly received some kind of medical attention, but really - they’d just left him where he’d fallen? No one had even helped him lie down?

That was just about when he realised that there was quite a lot of dried blood on the decking below him and, more to the point, a large piece of construction equipment protruding from his stomach.

Puzzled, he put his hand on it. His hand passed right through.

“Oh,” he said, after a moment’s thought. “Well.”

That hadn’t gone entirely to plan.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * 

It only took a moment of exploration to figure out that the Helicarrier was in drydock and undergoing some very extensive repairs, and therefore almost entirely deserted. That left Phil with a choice between figuring out which secret SHIELD base Fury was currently at (daunting), or going elsewhere for a current intelligence debrief. The members of the former Avengers could be anywhere by now, but Stark Tower and Jarvis were probably a pretty safe bet.

The Avengers, somewhat to Phil’s surprise, were all gathered in the Tower eating take-out and surrounded by the trappings of what looked to be a pretty serious reconstruction project when he arrived. That plus the relative calmness of the city told him that Loki’s plan had been foiled, at least ultimately, and that the teamwork-forged-by-adversity gambit had unexpectedly actually worked. He did wonder what Fury - and the Council - had had to say about the amount of damage done during the fight, though.

Phil melted through the wall by the elevator - disorienting, but oddly fun - and coughed quietly to announce his presence.

“Excuse me, could I have your attention for a moment?”

They looked up. Their jaws dropped. It was, if Phil was being strictly honest with himself, a little gratifying.

“What the _fuck?_ ” Barton demanded.

“ _Coulson?_ ”

“Yes,” Phil said. “As it happens, I appear to - “

Romanov’s hand appeared around his neck from behind.

“You picked the wrong person to impersonate - “ she began, and then her hand passed through him, which turned out to be very awkward for both of them.

“Ah,” Phil said when she’d recovered her balance and switched out her palm knife for a taser. “Yes. I was about to say that I appear to be noncorporeal at the moment.”

“What the fuck,” Barton repeated blankly.

“He means he’s a ghost,” Stark said, eyeing his drink with suspicion.

“I know what ‘noncorporeal’ means and I repeat _what the fuck_ ,” Barton said.

“All right,” Captain Rogers said, standing slowly. “Why don’t you have a seat, or - or stand over here, if you can’t sit, and we’ll see if we can figure this out.”

 _Watching that old-fashioned can-do optimism in action never gets old,_ Phil thought fondly.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * 

Half an hour later, they hadn’t made much progress. The Avengers had updated him on the Battle of New York - which explained Thor’s absence - and Phil had recounted what he could remember about dying and waking up again on the empty helicarrier.

“Could it have been the Destroyer gun?” Romanov hazarded. “Could that have done something? It’s reverse-engineered from Asgardian tech and that’s half magic, there’s really no telling what effects it could have.”

“No,” Stark said, flicking through schematics on one of his ubiquitous data screens. “The Destroyer might have been part magic but the mechanics in the gun itself were made from 100% Earthly materials. Unless you have a secret magician working on the project, which by the way would be a good idea and if you already have one you haven’t told us about I’m going to be seriously peeved, it was just technology.”

“Well,” Banner said reluctantly, cleaning his glasses on his shirt hem so he didn’t have to look at any of their expressions, “Culturally speaking, most ghost stories involve something the - the deceased has left undone or some wrong they want righted before they can, you know, pass on.”

“Soft science?” Stark said, sounding quietly betrayed. “You just used a soft science?” Banner shrugged apologetically.

“Well, it’s worth a shot,” Captain Rogers said, leaning forward. “Can you think of anything you need to do?”

Phil considered this. “Well, ordinarily I would have filed a report about the encounter with Loki and the performance of the Destroyer gun.”

“You came back from the dead for paperwork,” Barton said flatly.

Twenty minutes of dictation later, however, that turned out not to have been the case.

“Maybe it was the cellist!” Stark said, snapping his fingers. “The one in Portland! You want to tell her you love her one last time?”

“Not particularly,” Phil said. They’d parted on good terms, but they were really better as friends.

“Loki killed you. Do you want revenge?” Romanov asked.

“He sounds like he pretty much got what was coming to him,” Phil said. “I can’t imagine that Asgardian justice is going to be much fun.” He’d done a good bit of reading up on Norse myths after the Puente Antigua incident. Even accounting for the vagaries of time and cultural interpretation, the Norse pantheon had been a viciously creative bunch.

Banner, apparently the only other one who had done that particular branch of background reading, winced in agreement.

“You had a gigantic man-crush on Captain Clean-Cut, here,” Stark said, snapping his fingers again. “Do you want to sex him up or, I dunno, see him naked or something?”

“No,” Phil managed after a few moments of white-hot horror.

“Trading cards!” Barton burst out, apparently suffering from severe contact embarrassment. “You wanted him to sign your trading cards, right?”

“Oh!” Captain Rogers said, still blushing furiously. “I’ve got them right here. I kept them after, _you know_. Does anyone have a pen?”

Any thoughts Phil had about how thrilling it was for Captain Rogers to carry around his trading cards as a memento vanished when Rogers pulled them out of his shirt pocket.

“Blood?” Phil asked, dismayed. “You got _blood_ on them?”

There was an awkward pause.

“Um. Actually, it’s yours,” Rogers said apologetically. “Since they were in your jacket pocket when you, you know.”

“What?” Phil said indignantly. “I would _never_ \- in the middle of a battle? Those were mint! They were in pH neutral archival-quality envelopes in a secure box in my locker! Paper from the 1940s is already too acidic for its own good, I wasn’t going to expose those cards to anything I didn’t have to - “

“That manipulative bastard!” Stark said, eyes narrowing. “He must have thought we needed an extra push.”

 _This was never going to work... if they didn’t have something... to..._ Phil remembered himself saying. Well. He’d been right, and he’d been hoping Fury would understand what he’d meant, but still -

“What, the six pints of blood I left on the helicarrier deck wasn’t enough of a push for a bunch of superheroes?” he snapped.

They all flinched and he instantly felt bad. “I apologize,” he said. “That was directed at Fury, not you. You all seem to have pulled through quite admirably.”

“Thank you,” Rogers said politely.

“It was a pretty impressive battle, in the end,” Romanov agreed.

“I nearly nuked myself. It was very dramatic,” Stark said fondly.

“And then the Hulk had to kiss you back to life,” Barton said, copying Stark’s nostalgic tone.

“You weren’t there, _Katniss_ ,” Stark said, glaring.

“Is it possible that you need the cards to be replaced?” Banner suggested, miraculously staying on track.

A strange warm feeling shot through him. “Maybe,” Phil said, feeling a little embarrassed. “I think so.”

“Oh, no,” Stark said, grinning. “I know what it is. You need _Fury_ to replace them. _Personally_ , and at his own expense.”

The warm feeling solidified. “Yes, actually, I think that would do it quite nicely, Mister Stark,” Phil said, returning the smile. It had been quite an expensive undertaking, all things considered, and would only be more so now that his own set was off the market.

Romanov held up one hand. “Point of order,” she said. “Why are we trying to get rid of Coulson now that we’ve got him back?”

Phil blinked. That was unusually sentimental, for Romanov.

“That’s unusually sentimental for you,” Barton said, never one for tact. “Good point, though.”

“Do you _want_ to pass on?” Rogers said, leaning forward and fixing him with a sympathetic look.

Phil shrugged. “I’m not going to be much use here like this.”

“Are you kidding?” Barton said. “You can infiltrate _anything_ like that, man. And I bet if we tried we’d find out you have cool poltergeist powers you don’t even know about yet.”

“Jarvis responds to voice commands,” Stark said, already tapping away at his data screen. “You can still even do paperwork and stuff. I’ll set you up with an account.”

“I’ll need it,” Phil said, mind already spinning. “We don’t even have a form for un-deceasing someone yet. Come to think of it, we really should institute some kind of procedure to deal with unexpected shifts in employee existence...”

Rogers smiled. “How about it, Agent Coulson,” he said. “Want to be an Avenger?”

Despite himself, deep underneath his careful layers of professionalism and calm, Phil felt a spark of glee. “That sounds... quite manageable,” he said.

“Oh, man,” Stark laughed. “I can’t wait to see Fury's face when he finds out Agent Coulson is now Agent Ghost!”

“Ghost Commando!” Barton said, far too enthusiastically.

“The Suited Specter!”

“Phantasm!”

“Oooh, kinky...”

Across the table, Romanov gave him a long-suffering look.

“It’ll be good to have you on the team,” Rogers said warmly.

“Well,” Phil conceded. “The idea of you all operating without some kind of supervision _is_ quite terrifying. I suppose I really have no choice.”

Deep inside, his inner child made a noise that sounded suspiciously like _squee_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> All right, I admit it. My inner archivist cried a little when Fury ruined the trading cards. JUSTICE HAS NOW BEEN DONE.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Because why would I do work while I'm at work? Responsibility for this chapter lies solely with The_Lionheart, all I did was write it. ;-)

It began with sketches left oh-so-subtly on the kitchen island and the coffee table. When Phil persisted in ignoring these, he started finding fabric swatches in amongst his papers and, periodically, that the background of Jarvis’ interface had been changed to show alarmingly accurate schematics detailing potential superhero costumes.

That the schematics took into account the problems inherent in clothing someone with no physical presence was impressive. The color schemes were less so.

“I’m sorry,” Captain Rogers said sheepishly when the matter came to his attention. “I asked them to stop but it just made them look more determined. And, to be honest, it’s not bad for team-building and morale, which we could definitely use.”

Phil had to concede that last point. The Battle of New York had gone a long way towards turning the Avengers into a fighting force to be reckoned with, but interpersonally they were still... well, a lot of insanely powerful people with personality disorders living together, not to put too fine a point on it. The renovation of the Tower had taken several unexpected turns since the Battle, and only about twenty percent of them had been planned out ahead of time. Any activity that captured the attention of the Tower’s inhabitants and did little harm was probably to be encouraged.

Romanov picked up one of the sketches and frowned at it. “I think I saw this outfit on a male stripper in Rio once.”

Rogers choked on his coffee. Phil sighed and waited patiently while Romanov whacked him on the back with scientific accuracy.

“It’s not a problem, really,” Phil said. “Just a minor annoyance. But I have to confess that I’m a little worried about what will happen when Stark gets bored of giggling with Barton and talks Doctor Banner into trying to build some of the more esoteric technical aspects of some of those.” He was also a little worried about how anatomically accurate some of the more revealing costumes had been. Phil wasn’t exactly body-shy - he’d been in the armed forces, for God’s sake - but there was something very different about wearing boxer shorts in front of an indifferent audience, and finding a hand-drawn sketch of himself wearing what could really only be body paint.

Rogers paled, probably remembering the time they’d left Stark and Barton alone to come up with some new trick arrows and had eventually, through trial and error, ended up with a sun porch on the ninety-first floor.

“We should probably nip this in the bud,” Rogers agreed.

“Leave it to me,” Romanov said grimly.

“Actually,” Phil said, “I think I have an idea.”

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * 

It was several days before Phil could put his plan into motion. An aborted alien invasion - and the resulting scuffle with the Fantastic Four over who was in charge of the fight versus who was in charge of paying for the damage - had thrown a spanner in the works. It had also taken some concerted effort on Phil’s part to get the hang of changing his own appearance at will. Some of the results had been... unpredictable, and it had been a few hours before Rogers and Romanov could look him in the face.

Interruptions notwithstanding, the day after the chillingly polite team meeting between the Avengers and the Fantastic Four to iron out their procedural differences, Phil walked into the living room and was smugly satisfied to see Tony Stark drop his coffee mug in shock.

“Good morning, Mr. Stark,” he said calmly. “Have you had a chance to look over the Helicarrier upgrade schematics yet?”

Stark goggled.

“Well, when you have a chance. Good morning, Captain.”

“Good morning, Agent Coulson,” Rogers said, pokerfaced.

“Pass the ketchup?” Romanov asked.

“Wha?” Stark managed.

It had been difficult to find a middle ground between a costume that would get Stark’s attention and one that wouldn’t break Rogers’ composure, but it looked like their efforts had paid off.

“There had better be some coffee left,” Barton groaned, staggering into the kitchen. “My jet lag is _Jesus Christ nipples._ ”

“Barton,” Phil said, inclining his head. “I assume you’ll get your mission report to me by noon, since you’re back.”

“Buh,” Barton managed, putting his back against the wall and pointing at Phil’s chest. Stark sidled over to huddle by him.

“Well, he’s awake now,” Romanov deadpanned.

Behind Barton, Banner walked into the room and stopped dead. He gave Phil a long, considering look, blinked once, and then turned around and left.

“Clint,” Stark whispered loudly. “ _Clint_. He’s not wearing a suit. Clint. _Has this ever happened before?”_

Clint shook himself. “Once,” he said grimly. “Once, I saw him take his tie off.”

Phil remembered that. If memory served, he’d wrapped it around his hand to keep from busting up his knuckles while he punched an arms dealer repeatedly in the mouth. Afterwards he’d felt a little sheepish, but the man had had Barton tied up and dangling over a vat of corrosive chemicals. He really had been asking for it.

Stark cocked his head to one side. “Well, to be fair, he’s technically still wearing the tie.”

Phil preened a little bit. It was a nice tie. “I thought it was only fair, since you’d spent so much time on all those costume ideas,” he said serenely. “I thought I’d try a few different ones before I settled on a final choice.” He concentrated hard for a moment.

“ _Gah,_ ” Barton said. “Why did you give him that one? I told you not to give him that one!” Rogers abruptly sought refuge behind a newspaper, unable to keep a straight face.

Stark burst out laughing. “All right, I give! I cry uncle. I will also pay you or the charity of your choice a million dollars if you wear that to our next meeting with Fury.”

Phil considered this. The current costume did have pinstripes, after all. Pinstripes were classy.

“Better not,” he said finally. “It would take too long to train a replacement if he had a coronary.” He concentrated again. Barton and Stark both relaxed noticeably. Rogers peeked out from behind his newspaper, found the scenery to be relatively unthreatening, and went back to eating his scrambled eggs.

“You’re still wearing the cape,” Romanov said in an undertone.

“Oh,” Phil said innocently. “Darn. I guess it’s stuck.”

Romanov gave him a deeply suspicious look. Phil smiled blandly back. After a moment she scooted closer to Rogers.

Phil really quite liked the cape. Pinstripes were so _classy_.

**Author's Note:**

> All right, I admit it. My inner archivist cried a little when Fury ruined the trading cards. JUSTICE HAS NOW BEEN DONE.


End file.
